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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

I know that you would like to hear the tidings of he whom things havenot lived, but who lived and fulfilled himself. For you are a son of the earth,sucked dry by the suckling earth, that can suck nothing out of itself, but sucklesonly from the sun. Therefore you would like to have tidings of the son of thesun, which shines and does not suckle./ You would like to hear of the son of God, who shone and gave, whobegot, and to whom life was born again, as the earth bears the sun green andcolorful children.You would like to hear of him, the radiating savior, who as a son of thesun cut through the webs of the earth, who sundered the magic threads andreleased those in bondage, who owned himself and was no one's servant, whosucked no one dry, and whose treasure no one exhausted.You would like to hear of him who was not darkened by the shadow ofearth, but illuminated it, who saw the thoughts of all, and whose thoughtsno one guessed, who possessed in himself the meaning of all things, and whosemeaning no thing could express.

Friday, November 22, 2013

This animation
shows the most common type of gamma-ray burst, thought to occur when a
massive star collapses, forms a black hole, and blasts particle jets
outward at nearly the speed of light. Viewing into a jet greatly boosts
its apparent brightness. A Fermi image of GRB 130427A ends the sequence.
Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

On April 27, a blast of light from a dying star in a distant galaxy
became the focus of astronomers around the world. The explosion, known
as a gamma-ray burst and designated GRB 130427A, tops the charts as one
of the brightest ever seen.

A trio of NASA satellites, working in concert with ground-based robotic
telescopes, captured never-before-seen details that challenge current
theoretical understandings of how gamma-ray bursts work.
"We expect to see an event like this only once or twice a century, so
we're fortunate it happened when we had the appropriate collection of
sensitive space telescopes with complementary capabilities available to
see it," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in
Washington.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos, thought
to be triggered when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear
fuel, collapses under its own weight, and forms a black hole. The black
hole then drives jets of particles that drill all the way through the
collapsing star and erupt into space at nearly the speed of light.

Gamma-rays are the most energetic form of light. Hot matter surrounding a
new black hole and internal shock waves produced by collisions within
the jet are thought to emit gamma-rays with energies in the
million-electron-volt (MeV) range, or roughly 500,000 times the energy
of visible light. The most energetic emission, with
billion-electron-volt (GeV) gamma rays, is thought to arise when the jet
slams into its surroundings, forming an external shock wave.

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope captured the initial wave of gamma rays from GRB 130427A
shortly after 3:47 a.m. EDT April 27. In its first three seconds alone,
the "monster burst" proved brighter than almost any burst previously
observed.

"The spectacular results from Fermi GBM show that our widely accepted
picture of MeV gamma rays from internal shock waves is woefully
inadequate," said Rob Preece, a Fermi team member at the University of
Alabama in Huntsville who led the GBM study.

NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Burst Mission detected the burst almost
simultaneously with the GBM and quickly relayed its position to
ground-based observatories.

Telescopes operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as
part of the Rapid Telescopes for Optical Response (RAPTOR) Project
quickly turned to the spot. They detected an optical flash that peaked
at magnitude 7 on the astronomical brightness scale, easily visible
through binoculars. It is the second-brightest flash ever seen from a
gamma-ray burst.

Just as the optical flash peaked, Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT)
detected a spike in GeV gamma-rays reaching 95 GeV, the most energetic
light ever seen from a burst. This relationship between a burst's
optical light and its high-energy gamma-rays defied expectations.

"We thought the visible light for these flashes came from internal
shocks, but this burst shows that it must come from the external shock,
which produces the most energetic gamma-rays," said Sylvia Zhu, a Fermi
team member at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The LAT detected GRB 130427A for about 20 hours, far longer than any
previous burst. For a gamma-ray burst, it was relatively nearby. Its
light traveled 3.8 billion years before arriving at Earth, about
one-third the travel time for light from typical bursts.

"Detailed observations by Swift and ground-based telescopes clearly show
that GRB 130427A has properties more similar to typical distant bursts
than to nearby ones," said Gianpiero Tagliaferri, a Swift team member at
Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy.http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_Sees_Watershed_Cosmic_Blast_in_Unique_Detail_999.html
This extraordinary event enabled NASA's newest X-ray observatory, the
Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), to make a first-time
detection of a burst afterglow in high-energy, or "hard," X-rays after
more than a day. Taken together with Fermi LAT data, these observations
challenge long-standing predictions.

A mysterious blast of light spotted earlier this year near the
constellation Leo was actually the brightest gamma-ray burst ever
recorded, and was triggered by an extremely powerful stellar explosion,
new research reports.

On April 27, several satellites — including NASA's Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope — observed an unusually bright burst of gamma radiation. The explosion unleashed an energetic jet of particles that traveled at nearly the speed of light, researchers said.

"We suddenly saw a gamma-ray burst
that was extremely bright — a monster gamma-ray burst," study co-author
Daniele Malesani, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute at the
University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said in a statement. "This [was]
one of the most powerful gamma-ray bursts we have ever observed with the
Swift satellite."

The jet produced by the gamma-ray burst was formed when a massive star collapsed on itself and created a black hole
at its center. This generated a blast wave that caused the stellar
remnants to expand, producing a glowing shell of debris that was
observed as an extremely bright supernova explosion.

After analyzing properties of the light produced by the gamma-ray
burst, scientists determined that the original star was only three to
four times the size of the sun, but was 20 to 30 times more massive.
This extremely compact star was also rapidly rotating, the researchers
said.

Researchers are still investigating why the energy levels seen with GRB 130472A do not quite match predictions from existing models of gamma-ray bursts.
Their results could lead to more refined theories about how particles
are accelerated, which could help astronomers better predict the
behavior of cosmic events.

"The really cool thing about this GRB is that because the exploding
matter was traveling at [nearly] the speed of light, we were able to
observe relativistic shocks," study co-author Giacomo Vianello, a
postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in California, said in a
statement. "We cannot make a relativistic shock in the lab, so we really
don't know what happens in it, and this is one of the main unknown
assumptions in the model. These observations challenge the models and
can lead us to a better understanding of physics.

The gamma-ray burst was described in a series of studies published online today (Nov. 21) in the journal Science.

Gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, are the most powerful type of explosions in
the universe and typically mark the destruction of a massive star. The
original stars are too faint to be seen, but the supernova explosions that signal a star's death throes can cause violent bursts of gamma radiation, researchers said.

Gamma-ray bursts are usually short but extremely bright. Still,
ground-based telescopes have a tough time observing them because Earth's
atmosphere absorbs the gamma radiation.

The extremely bright gamma-ray burst seen earlier this year, officially
dubbed GRB 130472A, occurred in a galaxy 3.6 billion light-years away
from Earth, which, though still far away, is less than half the distance
at which gamma-ray bursts have previously been seen. This closer
proximity to Earth enabled astronomers to confirm for the first time
that one object can simultaneously create a powerful GRB and a supernova
explosion.

"We normally detect GRBs at great distance, meaning they usually appear
quite faint," study co-author Paul O'Brien, an astronomer at the
University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "In
this case, the burst happened only a quarter of the way across the
universe — meaning it was very bright. On this occasion, a powerful
supernova was also produced — something we have not recorded before
alongside a powerful GRB — and we will now be seeking to understand this
occurrence."

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Illustration by Andy Gilmore
Artist’s
rendering of the amplituhedron, a newly discovered mathematical object
resembling a multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its
volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated —
the probabilities of outcomes of particle interactions.

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that
dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and
challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of
reality.
“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.
The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in
nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a
decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of
laws describing elementary particles and their interactions.
Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas
thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of
the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent
one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily,
a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the
researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper,
computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also
facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would
seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe.
Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the
quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep
paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help
by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and
unitarity.

“Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed,
a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J., and the lead author of the new work, which he is presenting in talks and in a forthcoming paper. “Both are suspect.”

Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from
adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the
probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical
interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of
quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations
involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental
aspect of nature.

In keeping with this idea, the new geometric approach to particle
interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting
assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and
probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the
jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles
moving around in them, is a construct.

“It’s a better formulation that makes you think about everything in a completely different way,” said David Skinner, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.

The amplituhedron itself does not describe gravity. But Arkani-Hamed
and his collaborators think there might be a related geometric object
that does. Its properties would make it clear why particles appear to
exist, and why they appear to move in three dimensions of space and to
change over time.

Because “we know that ultimately, we need to find a theory that
doesn’t have” unitarity and locality, Bourjaily said, “it’s a starting
point to ultimately describing a quantum theory of gravity.”

Clunky Machinery
The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in
higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of
reality that can be calculated, “scattering amplitudes,” which represent
the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain
other particles upon colliding. These numbers are what particle
physicists calculate and test to high precision at particle accelerators
like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

United States Postal Service

The
iconic 20th century physicist Richard Feynman invented a method for
calculating probabilities of particle interactions using depictions of
all the different ways an interaction could occur. Examples of “Feynman
diagrams” were included on a 2005 postage stamp honoring Feynman.

The 60-year-old method for calculating scattering amplitudes — a
major innovation at the time — was pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Richard Feynman. He sketched line drawings of all the ways a
scattering process could occur and then summed the likelihoods of the
different drawings. The simplest Feynman diagrams look like trees: The
particles involved in a collision come together like roots, and the
particles that result shoot out like branches. More complicated diagrams
have loops, where colliding particles turn into unobservable “virtual
particles” that interact with each other before branching out as real
final products. There are diagrams with one loop, two loops, three loops
and so on — increasingly baroque iterations of the scattering process
that contribute progressively less to its total amplitude. Virtual
particles are never observed in nature, but they were considered
mathematically necessary for unitarity — the requirement that
probabilities sum to one.

“The number of Feynman diagrams is so explosively large that even
computations of really simple processes weren’t done until the age of
computers,” Bourjaily said. A seemingly simple event, such as two
subatomic particles called gluons colliding to produce four less
energetic gluons (which happens billions of times a second during
collisions at the Large Hadron Collider), involves 220 diagrams, which
collectively contribute thousands of terms to the calculation of the
scattering amplitude.

In 1986, it became apparent that Feynman’s apparatus was a Rube Goldberg machine.
To prepare for the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider
in Texas (a project that was later canceled), theorists wanted to
calculate the scattering amplitudes of known particle interactions to
establish a background against which interesting or exotic signals would
stand out. But even 2-gluon to 4-gluon processes were so complex, a
group of physicists had written two years earlier, “that they may not be evaluated in the foreseeable future.”

Stephen Parke and Tommy Taylor, theorists at Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, took that statement as a challenge.
Using a few mathematical tricks, they managed to simplify the 2-gluon to
4-gluon amplitude calculation from several billion terms to a
9-page-long formula, which a 1980s supercomputer could handle. Then,
based on a pattern they observed in the scattering amplitudes of other
gluon interactions, Parke and Taylor guessed a simple one-term expression
for the amplitude. It was, the computer verified, equivalent to the
9-page formula. In other words, the traditional machinery of quantum
field theory, involving hundreds of Feynman diagrams worth thousands of
mathematical terms, was obfuscating something much simpler. As Bourjaily
put it: “Why are you summing up millions of things when the answer is
just one function?”

“We knew at the time that we had an important result,” Parke said. “We knew it instantly. But what to do with it?”

The Amplituhedron
The message of Parke and Taylor’s single-term result took decades to
interpret. “That one-term, beautiful little function was like a beacon
for the next 30 years,” Bourjaily said. It “really started this
revolution.”

Arkani-Hamed et al.

Twistor
diagrams depicting an interaction between six gluons, in the cases
where two (left) and four (right) of the particles have negative
helicity, a property similar to spin. The diagrams can be used to derive
a simple formula for the 6-gluon scattering amplitude.

In the mid-2000s, more patterns emerged in the scattering amplitudes
of particle interactions, repeatedly hinting at an underlying, coherent
mathematical structure behind quantum field theory. Most important was a
set of formulas called the BCFW recursion relations, named for Ruth
Britto, Freddy Cachazo, Bo Feng and Edward Witten.
Instead of describing scattering processes in terms of familiar
variables like position and time and depicting them in thousands of
Feynman diagrams, the BCFW relations are best couched in terms of
strange variables called “twistors,”
and particle interactions can be captured in a handful of associated
twistor diagrams. The relations gained rapid adoption as tools for
computing scattering amplitudes relevant to experiments, such as
collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. But their simplicity was
mysterious.
“The terms in these BCFW relations were coming from a different
world, and we wanted to understand what that world was,” Arkani-Hamed
said. “That’s what drew me into the subject five years ago.”

With the help of leading mathematicians such as Pierre Deligne,
Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators discovered that the recursion
relations and associated twistor diagrams corresponded to a well-known
geometric object. In fact, as detailed in a paper posted to arXiv.org in December by Arkani-Hamed, Bourjaily, Cachazo, Alexander Goncharov, Alexander Postnikov and Jaroslav Trnka, the twistor diagrams gave instructions for calculating the volume of pieces of this object, called the positive Grassmannian.
Named for Hermann Grassmann, a 19th-century German linguist and
mathematician who studied its properties, “the positive Grassmannian is
the slightly more grown-up cousin of the inside of a triangle,”
Arkani-Hamed explained. Just as the inside of a triangle is a region in a
two-dimensional space bounded by intersecting lines, the simplest case
of the positive Grassmannian is a region in an N-dimensional space
bounded by intersecting planes. (N is the number of particles involved
in a scattering process.)
It was a geometric representation of real particle data, such as the
likelihood that two colliding gluons will turn into four gluons. But
something was still missing.

The physicists hoped that the amplitude of a scattering process would
emerge purely and inevitably from geometry, but locality and unitarity
were dictating which pieces of the positive Grassmannian to add together
to get it. They wondered whether the amplitude was “the answer to some
particular mathematical question,” said Trnka, a post-doctoral
researcher at the California Institute of Technology. “And it is,” he
said.

Nima Arkani-Hamed

A
sketch of the amplituhedron representing an 8-gluon particle
interaction. Using Feynman diagrams, the same calculation would take
roughly 500 pages of algebra.

Arkani-Hamed and Trnka discovered that the scattering amplitude
equals the volume of a brand-new mathematical object — the
amplituhedron. The details of a particular scattering process dictate
the dimensionality and facets of the corresponding amplituhedron. The
pieces of the positive Grassmannian that were being calculated with
twistor diagrams and then added together by hand were building blocks
that fit together inside this jewel, just as triangles fit together to
form a polygon.

Like the twistor diagrams, the Feynman diagrams are another way of
computing the volume of the amplituhedron piece by piece, but they are
much less efficient. “They are local and unitary in space-time, but they
are not necessarily very convenient or well-adapted to the shape of
this jewel itself,” Skinner said. “Using Feynman diagrams is like taking
a Ming vase and smashing it on the floor.”

Arkani-Hamed and Trnka have been able to calculate the volume of the
amplituhedron directly in some cases, without using twistor diagrams to
compute the volumes of its pieces. They have also found a “master
amplituhedron” with an infinite number of facets, analogous to a circle
in 2-D, which has an infinite number of sides. Its volume represents, in
theory, the total amplitude of all physical processes.
Lower-dimensional amplituhedra, which correspond to interactions between
finite numbers of particles, live on the faces of this master
structure.

“They are very powerful calculational techniques, but they are also
incredibly suggestive,” Skinner said. “They suggest that thinking in
terms of space-time was not the right way of going about this.”

Quest for Quantum Gravity
The seemingly irreconcilable conflict between gravity and quantum
field theory enters crisis mode in black holes. Black holes pack a huge
amount of mass into an extremely small space, making gravity a major
player at the quantum scale, where it can usually be ignored.
Inevitably, either locality or unitarity is the source of the conflict.

Puzzling Thoughts
Locality and unitarity are the central pillars of quantum field
theory, but as the following thought experiments show, both break down
in certain situations involving gravity. This suggests physics should be
formulated without either principle.

Locality says that particles interact at points in space-time. But
suppose you want to inspect space-time very closely. Probing smaller and
smaller distance scales requires ever higher energies, but at a certain
scale, called the Planck length, the picture gets blurry: So much
energy must be concentrated into such a small region that the energy
collapses the region into a black hole, making it impossible to inspect.
“There’s no way of measuring space and time separations once they are
smaller than the Planck length,” said Arkani-Hamed. “So we imagine
space-time is a continuous thing, but because it’s impossible to talk
sharply about that thing, then that suggests it must not be fundamental —
it must be emergent.”

Unitarity says the quantum mechanical probabilities of all possible
outcomes of a particle interaction must sum to one. To prove it, one
would have to observe the same interaction over and over and count the
frequencies of the different outcomes. Doing this to perfect accuracy
would require an infinite number of observations using an infinitely
large measuring apparatus, but the latter would again cause
gravitational collapse into a black hole. In finite regions of the
universe, unitarity can therefore only be approximately known.

“We have indications that both ideas have got to go,” Arkani-Hamed
said. “They can’t be fundamental features of the next description,” such
as a theory of quantum gravity.

String theory, a framework that treats particles as invisibly small,
vibrating strings, is one candidate for a theory of quantum gravity that
seems to hold up in black hole situations, but its relationship to
reality is unproven — or at least confusing. Recently, a strange duality
has been found between string theory and quantum field theory,
indicating that the former (which includes gravity) is mathematically
equivalent to the latter (which does not) when the two theories describe
the same event as if it is taking place in different numbers of
dimensions. No one knows quite what to make of this discovery. But the
new amplituhedron research suggests space-time, and therefore
dimensions, may be illusory anyway.

“We can’t rely on the usual familiar quantum mechanical space-time
pictures of describing physics,” Arkani-Hamed said. “We have to learn
new ways of talking about it. This work is a baby step in that
direction.”

Even without unitarity and locality, the amplituhedron formulation of
quantum field theory does not yet incorporate gravity. But researchers
are working on it. They say scattering processes that include gravity
particles may be possible to describe with the amplituhedron, or with a
similar geometric object. “It might be closely related but slightly
different and harder to find,” Skinner said.

Courtesy of Jaroslav Trnka

Nima
Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his
former student and co-author Jaroslav Trnka, who finished his Ph.D. at
Princeton University in July and is now a post-doctoral researcher at
the California Institute of Technology.

Physicists must also prove that the new geometric formulation applies
to the exact particles that are known to exist in the universe, rather
than to the idealized quantum field theory they used to develop it,
called maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. This model, which
includes a “superpartner” particle
for every known particle and treats space-time as flat, “just happens
to be the simplest test case for these new tools,” Bourjaily said. “The
way to generalize these new tools to [other] theories is understood.”

Beyond making calculations easier or possibly leading the way to
quantum gravity, the discovery of the amplituhedron could cause an even
more profound shift, Arkani-Hamed said. That is, giving up space and
time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big
Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure
geometry.

“In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of
the object,” he said. “But it’s not from the object changing. The object
is basically timeless.”

While more work is needed, many theoretical physicists are paying close attention to the new ideas.
The work is “very unexpected from several points of view,” said
Witten, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study.
“The field is still developing very fast, and it is difficult to guess
what will happen or what the lessons will turn out to be.”

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Charge
spirals because of movement and magnetism. It forms a torus that is constantly
inverting/reverting through the dipole magnetic field that exists because of
the charge.

It is an area of energy, a cloud, where some portions of the cloud are denser
than others. The denser portions of the cloud are represented as lines in the
work below.

The spirals are actually dual spirals. They are in ratio to Fibonacci. Ideally,
we should be using the Golden Mean, but the number crunching would be extreme.

The spirals flow out at one pole, and flow in at the other, hence the
inverting/reverting. Consider this the North and South poles of the magnetic
field that is created, again, because of charge in motion. The self generated
magnetic field guides the flow of charge. This form is stable, and
self-perpetuating.

This first image is a single torus form looking straight into the center from
North to South, or South to North.

We are going to need three of these with a common center point to form the
overall construct. The three of their centers are phase locked, or entangled
because of how the spin states interact with the adjacent spins states.

Below is a cross view of two more torus minus the first one. Remember, they are
actually small balls of energy and this is representing the densest areas of
the cloud, so we are only seeing it in 'line' form, though there are no lines.
It is all a field.

Looking at the center of the two, you can see how they wrap around each other
in the center convergence point. They are entangled.

To complete the vision of all three entangled together, we add the top/down
view with the side view to see how all the spins are in reference to each
other.

The center convergence area is entangled, and that entanglement shows patterns
that are seen as symbols. The Jesus Fish, the Eye of Providence, the Cross, The
Flower of Life, the Vesica Pisces, etc.

Now, we need to show where the spirals are in synergy with the adjacent
spirals. I believe that this synergy results in standing waves. These standing
waves create our first illusion of mass/matter. To see them we connect the
synergy areas with lines. These 'lines' are actually the standing waves.
Incredibly, they form the tesseract.

To see the beauty of this form, we need to
create many of them. When this is done, we can see the overall fractal design
and depth of the construct. It is fractal because of the nature of its
components. That is, the Golden Mean is infinite. The Tesseract is infinite.
But, when interacting with others of this form, we are given the finite
illusion of mass/matter. This web of form is supremely elastic, it bends and
flows without the need to break apart any parts of it. It is independent, as
well as dependent.